


hence

by JeanSouth



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-10
Updated: 2016-01-24
Packaged: 2018-05-12 21:41:01
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 9,881
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5681824
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JeanSouth/pseuds/JeanSouth
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Oikawa's not quite a growing boy any more, but it doesn't mean his libido's quieted down any more. In university he has the freedom of a fuckbuddy at any time of the night - but he can't keep things from getting complicated when his heart starts an argument with his mind.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Oikawa is roughly two-thirds of the way to an orgasm when he gets the hiccups, and it's not the sensation that makes him laugh (especially since his diaphragm is not kind, and it sort of hurts), but instead it's how much Ushijima is _enjoying_ it.

Every time he hiccups on a thrust in, he must – who knows? - hit his prostate or something. Whatever it is, he seems to be liking it.

Normally Ushijima's kind of quiet anyway. It's what makes him a good fuckbuddy: they don't talk much outside of booty calls and single lit class, and he's not loud-mouthed. Too blunt for his own good and just the wrong side of stoic, Oikawa might say.

But every time his vocal cords betray him on a loud, high-pitched  _hic_ , it's followed by a soft moan. He's too in to it to even notice Oikawa's head snap slightly back with the force of his hiccups until he can't keep thrusting for laughing too hard, his back bending to cushion his head on his forearms on Ushijima's chest, his back jerking as another hiccup racks through him.

“Are you alright?” Ushijima asks, and his face does spell an odd kind of concern – uncertainty mixed with the firm belief that he should be doing _something_ , anything, to help. The expression is softened by a contortion of pleasure at another soft _hic_ , the sound swallowed by Oikawa trying to breathe in, like a normal human being.

“Hiccups,” Oikawa explains, catches his breath, then succumbs to laughter at another hiccup.

“Hold your breath,” Ushijima says, and watches him as he's sure his face turns purple and his lung capacity seems woefully inadequate for a frequent sports-player. When his chest burns and he can't hold it anymore, he lets out a breath, and waits for a tense second.

It's just when Ushijima looks triumphant that – _hic_ .

“Breathe in for 8 seconds,” Ushijima looks annoyed. “Then out for four.”

A moment passes. Someone in the hallway calls out to a friend (it's a goodnight).

“I can't scare you. You know I'm here,” Ushijima tells him. “Can you do a handstand?”

With a look, or more precisely, a Look, Oikawa informs him he can, but will not, do a handstand in his tiny college apartment where he can't swing a cat without busting a light bulb and tearing down a bookshelf.

“Ah, that's it.” Ushijima sits up, and jostles Oikawa, now flaccid inside him. He doesn't seem to mind. He never seems to mind. He's weird that way. “Plug your ears, and drink all this.”

He has a half full, half-litre water bottle in his hands, and won't be dissuaded by a Look that has less intensity than the last. Resigned, he sticks his fingers in his ears and works past the urge to choke on his fourth big mouthful of water. By the end, his lungs burn (again) and if they had a voice they'd be asking him why, man? Why?

“I think they're gone,” he announces, incredulous, a half-moment later, and can't help but stare. Boggle, even. Awkwardly, he untangles himself from Ushijima's legs, and decides he needs a minute to get back on track and find it in him to go for round two. Or round one-and-a-half, he supposes. The kitchen is barely a dozen steps from the bed in his studio apartment, so he goes for the fridge instead to find more water, finding an excuse to not go again right away.

Only the soft sound of footsteps, somehow near-silent despite Ushijima's size, give him away. His hands brush Oikawa's waist as he reaches past him to take a sceptical look at left-over take-away, critically seeming to inspect it for any burgeoning signs of mould or other Oikawa-killing infectious diseases. He's a cleanly kind of guy, Oikawa has noticed. He can't sit around with lube-remnants all over him, or cum inside him, or have a completely unmade bed. In fact, Oikawa's apartment is cleanest after a booty call despite the fact that it never lasts long before it reverts to organized chaos.

Ushijima puts it back, and hovers behind him for an awkward moment, seeming reluctant to speak.

“Should I go?” he asks, his hands drawing back from the fridge when he steps away and folds a tea-towel into a neat square next to some dishes dripping dry on their drainage rack.

“Nah,” Oikawa tells him and shakes his head in reassurance. “Give me five minutes.”

Ushijima gives him five minutes, straightening knick-knacks on the windowsill in busy-work. They're just figurines and shoddily-filled picture frames with a plant on either end. Eventually, they're good and they try not to bother the neighbours, and Ushijima takes his leave.

-

Oikawa takes lunch in the communal hall pretty much every day. It's included in his tuition, conveniently close to any professor he needs to track down, and a common watering hole with both his friends and his classmates.

“You're so healthy,” Kuroo rolls his eyes when Oikawa sits, tray laden with salad and meat-heavy sandwiches, rounded out by a not-so-shiny apple on the side. His main concession to cheating from a healthy lifestyle is the sugar-rich coffee teetering dangerously close to the rim of his mug, threatening to spill. “It's horrible. Would it kill you to get a burger for lunch and make me feel less bad?”

Kuroo motions to his own plate, laden with three burgers of a variety of cheese and grease, complemented by a generous helping of fries and sauces. Oikawa rolls his eyes at him; all those burgers aren't Kuroo's anyway. Come a quarter of an hour before afternoon classes start, Bokuto will come streaking from the dorms, desperate for food when the cafeteria staff have already closed up, then he'll come over and scavenge from Kuroo's tray. It's kind of sweet, in a sickening way. Little ways that say _I care_. People don't really do that for Oikawa, not overtly, at least. He's more of an independent kind of guy, and his friends respect that too much to just push into his comfort zone.

“Would it kill you to eat a banana?” Oikawa fires back, spearing some romaine lettuce and a tomato slice on his fork, watching the juvenile smile start to creep on to Kuroo's face, cut short by Kenma's tiny shake of the head.

“I eat plenty of bananas,” Kuroo tells him breezily, waving his burger nonchalantly in the air in lieu of being able to gesture normally. “Not as many as you, though.”

His eyebrows waggle slightly, glancing off somewhere to the left of them.

“That's probably one big banana, though,” Hinata says as Oikawa makes an awkward kind of eye contact with Ushijima. He waves first, and though they never speak outside of bananas and energetic sex, he waves back. Ushijima's friends promptly elbow him in the side until he looks winded, and gestures to Oikawa as he leaves the room. It leaves him feeling somehow annoyed.

“Everything seems big to you,” he snipes off at Hinata by accident, then apologizes to his plate for being snippy. Why would it bother him if Ushijima's friends knew they were fucking? They probably already did, anyway. And why would it bother him if his own friends knew too?

-

Oikawa calls him over come eight at night on a Wednesday night, not too late since they both have classes, and not on the kind of day where they'd have plans. Wednesday, in the grand scheme of things, has become their sex day when pizza with friends or late nights at a karaoke bar just aren't in the cards (for Oikawa, though he's not all too sure what Ushijima does on the weekends. He should ask, it'd be polite).

Ushijima rings the bell not long after and hangs his coat up when he comes in; he likes neat and tidy and everything in its place. The coat rack (a glorified coat-hanger over the back of the bathroom door, facing into the hallway) has a few out-of-season coats on it while his late-fall coat is in the chair by the window with his bag and his glasses and anything else he dumped when he got in for the day. It's a pseudo-landing strip, convenient and easy.

When the coats are hung and boots are off, Oikawa seizes his chance and rears up, his fingers sinking into Ushijima's hair and fisting in it, pulling slightly until he bends and ducks his head down for a kiss, his lips savaged in a bruising, aroused kiss. His lips tingled or at least ache where Oikawa's teeth dig into them, nipping and asking – no, demanding – access to his mouth to taste at a flavour that is all Ushijima and a hint of spearmint toothpaste. The taste is nothing to write home about, strictly speaking, but it goes straight to Oikawa's cock, his body well aware of the taste and what it means, where else his mouth will be with not much time left to go.

He bumps into clutter, a discarded scarf here and an upturned edge of a carpet there. Oikawa rolls his hips as he pauses for a second mid-guide, tempting Ushijima to follow with the feeling of his stiff cock pressing through his jeans to rub at Ushijima's hip, promising a long evening ahead of them.

“You get here quicker every time,” Oikawa pauses to say, and dips his head to suck up a mark on Ushijima's neck, not leaving off until a lurid red mark shows itself. He leaves one every time they start, curious to see how long each one lasts. The neck takes them best, but on his chest they look more perverse and perfectly placed. Unbidden, he feels a smile make its presence known at the sight, and he's pushed back into his bed without warning, a heat starting to rise in Ushijima's guarded eyes.

“The route gets better,” Ushijima offers in obvious excuse, then leans back to strip his shirt off over his head, and as though he can't help it, drape it at least semi-neatly over the end of the bed. The laugh that follows can't be helped until Oikawa drags him down for another kiss, relishing the size of Ushijima and the inherent strength in his firm biceps. He's always had a preference for large men, and this one fits the bill perfectly.

A faint trail of dark brown hair winds its way from the hem of Ushijima's waistband up to his navel, then past it to a smattering of chest hair here and there, giving way to his pert, pink nipples.

“You're just eager to see me,” Oikawa counters and sits up, his hands sliding down Ushijima's spine to linger at his tail bone, his fingers slowing to a crawl before they slip into his underwear and run over the soft dip hinting at the cleft of Ushijima's pert buttocks, hiding the hole he can't wait to get at. Now that he's sitting he can topple them to the side, barely keeping them from rolling to the floor as he stands after, stripping off his own shirt and the soft lounge pants he'd slipped in to after coming home. “And I have something eager to see you.”

He drops to his knees, the carpet mercifully plush underneath them, and tugs at Ushijima's jeans until he gives in and lifts his hips, his underwear coming along with them by the power of friction, leaving him bare when they're discarded without second thought. His cock lays half-hard in a brown thatch of curls, his tip just shy of a rosy pink, his thighs pale where the light never gets to touch them. They spread at the lightest graze of Oikawa's fingertips heading towards them from his knees, parting like the red sea for a kiss to drop on the skin, more kisses trailing to the crease where his thigh meets his ass, dangerously close to the edge of the bed but perfect when Oikawa grips a handful of ass and spreads him to show his pink hole to the world; as it gives a slight twitch to the cold air washing over it, then the breath of cold air Oikawa blows at him just to see it twitch and move again as if asking to be caressed.

He leans forward, soothing the offence by running the flat of his tongue over Ushijima's hole near-silently, though his hips buck and almost dislodge Oikawa's hands. He grips again and shifts closer, licking again with more pressure, laving the flat of his tongue over it until Ushijima gives in and moans; a faint, quiet thing, more high pitched than he'd expected the first time, but genuine, slipping from his throat like a secret to hoard close and pride himself on dragging out.

Testing his jaw for a second, Oikawa firms his tongue and uses his fingers to splay Ushijima, slipping a fingertip inside him quickly followed by his tongue, wriggling it for good measure as he lets go with one hand to reach into the bed side cabinet and rummage for the tell-tale feel of a bottle of lube, popping the cap open as he finds it then lifts his arm to let some drip out, the wet liquid dripping down Ushijima's perineum to his hole. The distinct strawberry smell fills his senses, quickly followed by the taste as he uses the slick momentum to slip his finger fully inside, joined by a second.

At first they'd had to go slow, but now Ushijima grins and bares it for just a second before his body acclimates and welcomes him, pulsing around his fingers before they greet him with a gentle brush of his prostate. He feels soft and hot inside, constantly familiar. Without much ado he slips in a third finger, then a fourth; after the first time with some discomfort, a twist of Ushijima's face in displeasure, he's always felt responsible for stretching him well enough that he can't think of anything but getting Oikawa inside of him and giving over to it.

He pulls his fingers from Ushijima with a wet noise, a strand of lube dangling between his fingers and skin before it gives way to gravity and lets him leave; he feels tethered nonetheless, like a fire wouldn't stop him if it tried.

The bottle of lube finds it way to the bed after he opens it again and drips it onto his hands, warming it with a few quick rubs of his hands before he slicks his cock tip to root wet and glistening. Without prompting Ushijima lays further back on the bed, his long legs bent at the knee to spread and tempt. When Oikawa kneels to bend between them and grip at Ushijima's hips to position him properly, he can't stop himself from following through to take another kiss, sloppily eating at his mouth, taking breaths between the seconds when his tongue explores Ushijima.

Simultaneously he guides the head of his cock to Ushijima's hole, pushing to penetrate him while Ushijima's hands pull and tug at his hair, though whether it's to slow down or speed up he can't tell. Maybe it's just to not stop, either way.

When he's sheathed he pauses, drawing back to glance at Ushijima through his eyelashes. He has nice eyes, Oikawa thinks, caught in them for a second as firmly and as physically as if he were being dragged by invisible hands. Suddenly he feels like he's out of breath so he shakes himself and pulls back, his hips snapping back afterwards to drive him in, setting a quick, punishing pace when he hooks one of Ushijima's legs over his shoulder and uses the position to drive himself deeper, his cock brushing Ushijima's prostate on every other stroke, those gasps and moans filtering through his haze of lust again as they grow louder, tugging Ushijima closer and closer to orgasm, his head tilted back and his plush lips slightly parted, slick and shiny with a mix of their saliva after their sloppy kisses. He tightens gradually, digging the heel of his foot in to the bed, the other tensing to hold Oikawa in place as he comes, his seed splattering over his own stomach, tangling in the trail of hair leading up to his belly button.

That's mostly the sight that makes Oikawa come undone; he revels in the pleasure of others and causing it, and lets go with a few jerky motions of his hips, his seed dripping from his slit into Ushijima to rest there until he slips his fingers inside himself to clean it out in Oikawa's shower.

With a sigh that seems to take the breath from him, Oikawa pulls out and topples to the side, his arm draped loosely over Ushijima, his fingers resting on one firm shoulder.

“That was good,” he says when he catches his breath and has to resist the urge to fall asleep; it would seem too much like cuddling, and that's not the kind of guy he is. Even if it's comfortable, and he's comfortable, and the silence is comfortable in that he doesn't need to say anything for Ushijima to know how long the afterglow goes on for or when the inklings of restlessness stir in Oikawa. Ushijima just gets him.

Rolling over fully, Oikawa spreads himself out like a starfish and looks at his plain white ceiling.

“You must be hungry,” he says after a while, letting the statement hang in the air as if it was a question. Ushijima doesn't answer. He's not sure if it's pedantness or just how Ushijima is that he won't answer non-questions at all. “I have leftovers in the fridge if you want a sandwich.”

The offer feels awkward, and new, and he lets Ushijima shower first while he settles in to watch one of his dramas. It only makes sense.


	2. Chapter 2

After the first time Ushijima stays longer than just the afterglow, he stays longer more often. He organises Oikawa's shower shelf. A bottle of Garnier conditioner, then shampoo makes its way onto the shelf too. It's because he's calling Ushijima over on Mondays now too; it must be his hair washing day, and who is Oikawa to tell a man to change his life for a booty call?

“Yeah,” Oikawa says into the phone. The cat charm on it dangles from the bottom by a bit of string and tickles at his neck until he reaches up to rub at it vigorously. “Two, please. One meat feast, one veggie feast, but without mushrooms. Yeah. Yeah. Barbeque. Extra cheese sounds good.”

He paces, walking the length of the room until he almost bumps into his mirror, then turning to reach the door again. It's not much space, but he likes to walk as he talks.

“Maybe some dough balls,” he agrees after a moment's hesitation, and hears the shower shut off. He has this habit of ordering way too much, then living on it for the next three days. Really, though, ice cream just sounds good. Fudgey, minty ice cream...

Across the room, the door cracks open to allow Ushijima back in, wrapped in a nice, fresh towel. He smells faintly of flowers. His eyes slide from menus to the clock to Oikawa and linger there.

“ _No_ ,” he says, with emphasis, as if he knows Oikawa is seconds from agreeing to brownies with walnut and fudge bits in the middle. He really does love sweets. Spinach is good and apples are great but really, can a man not have an indulgence?

“No, thank you,” he repeats mournfully down the phone, his best pout doing nothing to sway Ushijima with his back turned to him to root in his gym bag for a comb and clean underwear. “That's all for us this time. What time did you say?”

Saying his thanks, he hangs up and flops into his chair. It had been a pain to get up the stairs, bulky and awkward, but it's big enough for even his long legs to fit when he folds them. When he reads, or does homework, or even watches movies, he ends up shifting from one uncomfortable-looking position to the next.

“Thirty-five minutes!” he calls to the turned back, only to receive a faint grunt in reply. The notion of childishness is all that stops him from lobbing a paper ball at Ushijima's head. Here he is, providing for them. A true hunter-gatherer. “I got ice cream.”

That gets a reaction, but only the small one of a deep, slightly put-upon sigh. Ushijima did the best impression of being world-weary, honest to God tired of being a corporeal being sometimes. Oikawa could imagine him as some other-worldly prince, dramatically but handsomely carrying the burden of a kingdom on his shoulders.

Too many space-operas, he decides a moment later. Way, way too many.

-

“I'm just saying,” Oikawa does, indeed, say. “You don't have to cook for me. Like, I eat well! I swear to God! I'll let you sit at my lunch table and look at my lunches if you have to! I'm not poisoning my body.”

His hands, gesturing broadly, come fairly close to accidentally knocking over a display, so he stuffs them in his pockets and tries to protest more gingerly. In the basket hung between them, occasionally bumping into his hip, is beef, and vegetables, herbs and things that would make a _stock_ , things that would all go into a pan to make a meal like some kind of science.

“I mean,” he exaggerates for the hell of it, his intrinsic need to over-dramatize taking over when they hit the freezers and his mind tells him that hey, he protested long enough. If Ushijima really wants to do this and the take-out bothers him that much? Let him. He'll live. And home cooked food has the greatest kinds of leftovers. “Cooking is some sort of witchcraft, and it's not entirely ruled out that I'm not just so beautiful that this entire trip and your sudden interest in my nutrition isn't some Evil-Queen ploy to murder me and become the fairest in the land, but I do like meals with a lot of meat, and you have plenty there.”

The cashier's greeting is all that stops him from throwing in that, of course, he is a growing boy _expending_ a lot of _energy_ when Ushijima _cums_ over. It just seems a tad on the wrong side of inappropriate, so he banks it for other times when he can try again to crack Ushijima's unrepentant, thick joke armour. After his first failed joke, he figures any regular man might have given up, but he is no regular man, and he will see tears in those eyes from laughter before he gives up. Long before he gives up.

“If you don't know how to cook, you can chop everything when we get back. It's chopping and combining. If it's a science, it's not rocket science.” A beat of silence passes, as if he hesitates as he rubs his thumb over the edge of a tomato's imaginary bruise. Then Ushijima adds, "And then you can be sure there's no poison."

A smile starts to crack at the edge of Ushijima's mouth, as if he's not used to making jokes, but it's, well, it's _something_. A much wider, natural-feeling smile takes over Oikawa's expression instead.

“ _That_ ,” Oikawa proclaims. “Is exactly what an evil witch would say to convince me to eat the stew that will turn me into a particularly charismatic miniature person forced to adventure through more worlds than is strictly fair.”

Grabbing one of the bags of groceries, he waits for a response, then for the feeling of disappointment when he doesn't get one going along with his mad skit. When it doesn't come, he has to take a minute to dig through his feelings and identify them as victorious anyway. This is a victory – and next time? Maybe he'll get a laugh.

-

Then, Oikawa meets him outside of class, with a full bag that he carries around like it weighs nothing. Oikawa _knows_ , though. That thing is a menace, filled with enough books to make the lady from 101 Dalmatians look sane. No man has that much need for every classic ever written in any language ranging from Latin to Japanese to Gaelic (with some, of course, well-meaningly translated. He can get behind Ushijima speaking Latin, but Gealic, not so much).

“On your way to apologize for robbing the library?” he teases when they pass each other in a hallway, and it takes him a second under Ushijima's scrutinizing gaze to realize what he's done. The invisible boundary – the one that says conversations start with sex, include sex, then maybe lately go on for a little while but then end before too long after sex – seems to metaphorically blur under his feet. His face doesn't heat only by virtue of the fact that he very, _very_ rarely blushes: an untold talent all of its own.

“If this were Alexandria, I would be lauded a hero,” Ushijima says as if it's matter-of-fact, his body blocking a gaggle of people who circumvent rather than pick fights, their eyes shooting a displeased feeling at him that seems to slide off the nearly-oblivious outer shell Ushijima carries. It takes a second, maybe two, before _Alexandria_ clicks with studying, and history, and it startles a laugh out of him when he finally gets to it. History, not his strongest subject. He feels sort of proud for getting the reference anyway.

“Yeah? Is that your deep, dark fantasy? You, running out of a burning library hauling a cart behind you full of manuscripts?” It's meant as a tease, a bit of a jest at his love of books, but the instant he says it and Ushijima's eyes come very close to glazing over a bit at the idea of managing it, he realizes he's wrong. Pinpointing why is fairly easy: things Ushijima enjoys, he enjoys unabashed and without shame. A monster in gym shorts, he thinks to himself when running pops in to his head, the way Ushijima's friends seem to heckle him to slow down if he catches them early enough in the morning. He does everything wholeheartedly. The idea seems a bit overwhelming, a bit terrifying. If sports, or books, or the idea that one should take good care of one's self with good nutrition were a person, and had all that attention focused on them with such precision... they might be tempted to run.

(When that is all said and thought of, though, the idea is a pleasant one: to be wholeheartedly, unabashedly loved seems like the fiercest force in the world. Helen of Troy springs to mind if he's on the topic of books, so his thoughts shy from her again. Ushijima, though, would probably have no qualms holding hands in public, and telling a passer-by it's because he _wants_ to.)

“It would be nice,” Ushijima says eventually, possibly after running the sequence through his mind like a movie filled with heroic shots, possibly others doing the same to salvage what they can. “But impossible.”

The thought seems to sadden him a little. Not a true sadness that will linger, but a momentary dip at the thought of what could have been. Oikawa needs to _do_ something. He's a do something sort of man, not a talk-it-out kind of guy, which his sister says, reading aloud from magazines, could be a problem.

“I'll buy you a coffee, if you let me watch the librarian yell at you,” he elbows Ushijima in the side, watches his lips purse slightly, and prepares for the information that librarians _love_ Ushijima. He always puts things back where he found them.

-

“No can do,” he says, approximately at lunch on a Monday. In front of him he has something trying to pass for a quiche, and next to it the choice of steamed veggies, piled high. It's an experimental choice offered by the cafeteria right now, and honestly? He's tempted to write an impassioned letter on their behalf. Still crunchy instead of over boiled, still enough flavour without bitterness, and definite proof he can eat well.

“Why not?” Kuroo wheedles, his hand mesmerisingly disappearing and reappearing through the silvery spikes of hair gracing Bokuto's sleep-ruffled head. Oikawa doesn't know how he does it and keeps it soft enough to pet. His own needs hairspray and a bit of wax, and it's nice, but fingers would probably snag if they tried to run through it. He considers asking, but Bokuto yawns loud, and wide, and seems to sink even further in to his chair if that's even possible.

“I have plans on Wednesdays,” he shrugs, stuffing his mouth with broccoli in an excuse not to elaborate without being pushed to. Any other people, he thinks, would give up. Not Kuroo, though. Not Hinata, for that matter. Kenma he'd just tell, if he asked. He's not the kind to go shouting from the rooftops that Oikawa calls every Wednesday without fail, and it's a standing appointment he won't move.

“Yeah? What plans?” Kuroo untangles his hand and rests his elbows on the table, then his chin on his hands, his visible eye narrowing in catlike curiosity. When he's in a mood he's impossible, so Oikawa sighs and gives up. They'll figure it out anyway.

“Wednesdays I call Ushijima over,” the chaos allows itself to be waited on for a few moments while Oikawa sips coffee and hopes the caffeine will allow him to be brave enough to follow his fight instinct instead of bolting from the cafeteria before the interrogation begins.

The chaos comes on slowly, like a mass surrounding him.

“And you won't move this appointment?” Kuroo asks.

“How long have you been doing this?” Hinata leans in closer to him, the subtle scent of his shampoo mingling with roasted arabica beans.

“Prob'ly likes him,” Bokuto offers his quiet opinion, quiet only because his own coffee has yet to kick in. Somewhere in the corner, Kenma does a sort of shrug-nod-raised-eyebrows combination Oikawa has learned to take as agreement.

“You dating him?” Kuroo seizes on the statement and leans in closer, his hands palms-down on the table for leverage if he wants to stand up and lean in close, inspect his eyes for a hint of untruth.

“Fuckbuddies,” Oikawa says between the questions.

“Just fuckbuddies?” Hinata pipes up, as if such a thing seems unlikely to him. Scepticism doesn't suit him, but Oikawa may be biased to wanting someone on his side in this.

“When were you going to tell us?” someone asks, though he can't tell who anymore. He feels almost close to dizzy with questions, and pushes his tray forwards so he can cushion his head in his forearms and pretend not to listen. When the chaos dies down and melts into the sound of Bokuto waking ravenous to attack his lunch, he sits back up straight again and pushes his food around his plate, but quite hungry anymore.

“You'd introduce him to us if you were dating, wouldn't you?” Kenma asks a while later, looking up from his phone to check Oikawa knows it's a question for him.

“Yeah,” Oikawa says, and accounts the bitterness on his tongue to coffee, not lies. “But we're not.”

-

Then, as Oikawa is wont to do, Oikawa ruins everything when his _do something_ personality spills over into a _say something_ moment and he doesn't think rationally.

“Hey!” someone calls from behind him some few days later, and he recognises this guy in the vaguest sense of the word. It's like someone described him once in a rumour and the description stuck in his head, and this guy fills in the blank spots of memory. With a squint he tries to figure it out, and stops cold when he realizes from where he knows him.

Ushijima's friend. Not what he really wants to see when his early-week conversation keeps playing over in his head, cropping up when he's doing the dishes because he can't figure out what went wrong in it and what nags him.

“Hey,” he says back though, because he was raised with manners, and this might be something innocent.

“We're having a party, Saturday night but next week, not this week, and you should come,” this- this _stranger_ jamming himself into Oikawa's equilibrium says to him, who takes his silence for agreement and rummages in his bag for paper and a pen to scribble an address for not far from where they're standing.

“Why?” he says when he takes the note stuffed in his hand with a time and a name and a place that all feel very unreal to him in that second.

“Well, y'know,” the guy rubs the back of his neck with his hand in some shy type of gesture, and Oikawa doesn't _know_. “It's not every day Ushijima makes a friend, I guess. Not one he talks about, at least. And you've come up, and you seem sort of special? We haven't asked because it seems sort of... something he'll say when he's ready, but you guys are dating, right?”

The words seem to grab at him viciously, melding in to the conversation that keeps springing up in his mind, and he crumples the note in his hand.

“I have to go,” he tells the confused look on this stranger's face, and turns on his heel in the direction he came from, taking long, purposeful strides despite the unsteady balance his shattered status quo seems to cause. He doesn't notice, but people move when he keeps to his side of the pavement, then his side of the stairs, until he's knocking on a plain brown door that opens to Ushijima and the smell of cologne.

Hands shaking with an anger flooding him for reasons unknown, he pushes Ushijima back inside and slams the door behind him, making it shake in its hinges while the rooms on either side of this one go quiet at the sound.

“Do you think it's funny, telling your friends we're together?” Oikawa starts, and paces. The room isn't very wide, but he puts his force in the about-turns. Ushijima doesn't get a chance to do more than open his mouth. “Why would you? We're not!”

He runs his hands through his own hair, then swings them about to enunciate his words.

“I wouldn't date you!” he cries out, stopping for a second to look at Ushijima – then immediately look away, something on his face contorted into something he can't look at. “You're a freak! You don't talk to people, and you're bossy as all hell, and yeah, you're a good fuck, but that's it!”

The neighbours are still silent when Ushijima comes closer and puts a hand on his shoulder only to have it shaken off again straight away.

“Don't.” Oikawa snipes, moves away to restlessly shift from one foot to the other elsewhere. “You're boring, all books and not much else.”

His mouth feels suddenly dry, so coffee seems reasonable. Coffee and getting out of here when Ushijima feels like the biggest thing in the room suddenly, hands at his sides and a hurt look on his face.

“You don't know me,” Oikawa says and turns, then pointedly doesn't flee from the room.


	3. Chapter 3

“We should go to the convention.”

Oikawa's suggestion is not so much out of the blue as out of his character. In his hands he flaps about a flimsy piece of glossy paper that awkwardly reflects the ceiling lights into Hinata's eyes and makes him flinch a tiny little bit. It's brightly coloured all over with an itinerary squashed on to it and the less important details in equally garish small print.

Moments before, it had been on the table. Kenma manages to only look slightly like he wishes it could still be on the table at the moment, avoiding Oikawa's enthused declaration that they should all go. It'll have all sorts, of course, and it'll be less awkward for Kenma if they go as a group. Less chance of strangers popping out of nowhere, and there's not many eyes that get past every one of them to settle on Kenma in their midst as the most likely person to be interested in a lame marketing pitch.

“You don't like conventions,” Kuroo leans back from where he's on the arm of his couch until his back is flat on it and his head hangs off the end. He looks at Oikawa upside down, his fringe not quite adhering to gravity as much as he strictly supposes it should.

“I might,” Oikawa says. “If I gave them a chance.”

Kuroo rolls his eyes, his arms coming down to dangle off the couch too, stretching like a cat basking in the sun. His eyes close at the pleasant feeling for a second before he starts to sit back up, his question a bit less audible when he's facing the TV again and has his back to Oikawa. “Don't you wanna do something with your not-boyfriend in the weekend?”

“We broke up,” seems to hang quietly in the air of Kuroo and Bokuto's apartment when Oikawa says it, like it's some kind of dark, attention-grabbing void. Suddenly, Kenma is even more interested in his phone than usual, though his fingers have stopped moving quite as quickly. Hinata peers over his shoulder as if whatever game it is is a myriad of fascinations to rival a house fire for captivating attention. Kuroo, suddenly, finds his books extremely interesting despite the cries not minutes before that if he studies any more his brain will implode, and Bokuto rifles through his bag at least three times for an object of diversion. He doesn't much want to talk about it, but he'd rather not have it come up in a month and feel like he left them out.

Their eyes slide unsubtly from their distractions to each other, a sad form of silent communication.

“Was there something to break up?” Hinata asks, and Kuroo's glare says he'd picked up the wrong signal.

“Yeah,” Oikawa says, then feels sort of relieved to admit it. There was something there, but not anymore. Ushijima doesn't really know him, after all. He's this petty kind of guy that gets annoyed at seeing Ushijima with his friends in the cafeteria, and wants to hoard his jokes to himself, and it's not healthy. Ushijima can do _better_ , and Oikawa thanks a long session in the shower thinking about his outburst for the revelation. He wants to claim too much of Ushijima. He shrugs as if he can dislodge the topic of conversation. “The convention is next weekend.”

The air still feels clammy and uncomfortable, and the murmurs that agree to go are about as enthusiastic as a funeral.

-

“He's with someone else,” Oikawa says at the sight of some tall guy with dark, close-cropped hair resting a hand on Ushijima's elbow from across the road. He knows this guy, vaguely. Mature, handsome, deeply talented and smart. Some of the girls in his class sigh over-dramatically when he wanders by their window, extolling his every positive trait. “This soon?”

A tiny feeling of nausea creeps up his oesophagus, starting somewhere in the middle of his chest. He can't decide if it's his bitterness at seeing Ushijima with some paragon of virtue, or heartburn. Fried food always gives him heartburn.

“I doubt they're together,” Bokuto says, too loud for comfort and only by a miracle not obvious enough to draw attention to them. He shrugs at the look levelled at him and avoids his narrowed eyes to scan their posture. “They're probably just friends.”

_Friends_ , he almost scoffs. Ushijima is available, but won't stay that way for long. He is, after all, gorgeous. Tall, with lovely smooth skin and deep eyes that will drag a man in. Nice hair looking for a hand to card through it and appreciate the coconut scent that becomes apparent when someone is just close enough, then his small slips at humour given up only to someone close to him, giving them that special feeling of being the one let close enough to know what thoughts and puns run through his head (with censor, but not unsaid; Ushijima is always honest as a virtue, but if it's not  _important_ it doesn't come up as much). His food tastes excellent, home cooked and hearty; as delectable as the urge to drop kisses on his thighs when they spread, and he lets himself open so  _nicely_ .

“I don't doubt they're together,” Oikawa says, hoisting his bag further onto his shoulder and finally taking a step further forward. “That guy's standing way too close to him to not try to get him in bed.”

Bokuto shrugs, follows. He clearly doesn't agree, but he doesn't push it. Somehow, he always ends up being right when it's a matter of  _people_ .

It soothes something sharp into Oikawa to think Ushijima isn't with someone  _good_ .

-

Oikawa opens the door on a Saturday evening to Hinata with two small pizzas, a clear box of two _really_ good salads from the place a few streets away from Hinata's place that are good enough to be elevated to take out status, and a big bottle of diet coke that Oikawa's fridge has tragically run out of.

“I downloaded, like, the _entirety_ of everything Monty Python related,” Hinata tells him, bouncing enough that Oikawa doubts the safety of the bottle of diet coke and reaches out from a distance to take it and hide it in a nice, safe corner for a good half-hour before his floor turns into a sticky mess of sugar-substitutes and corn syrup.

“I guess you wanna watch it, huh?” Oikawa pretends not to have quite the same level of enthusiasm, but he doesn't mind comedies, and the company is nice. He's gotten sort of used to having someone over it, but in time he'll re-adjust to going back to normal. From the pile near the bed he pulls out two of his fluffiest blankets and checks to make sure his pants are lounge-worthy and comfortable for an evening of shared couch-potatoeing.

“I talked to Ushijima,” Hinata says during a quiet interval, when he comes back from a bathroom break and hasn't quite pressed play. His eyes are firmly on Oikawa's adam's apple, and when he notices, Oikawa can't help but glance down and notice Hinata's bob too as he swallows harshly.

“Why?” he interrupts, bothered by all the ways he can't get rid of Ushijima. His shampoo is still in the bathroom, sitting snugly in the corner where it best fits the metal tray, and his plant lives on the windowsill (his plant, still; Oikawa had insisted on it when it entered his house as a gift, so Ushijima would be responsible for the eventual death), his presence on campus, and even in interaction with his friends. “There's no need for you to talk to him.”

The words seem, he thinks a split second after, maybe a bit mean, but his tone has no bite, only a displeased confusion that tends more towards distress, the frustration almost cracking his voice near the edge of it until he covers it with a tiny cough.

“He misses you,” Hinata says, matter of fact, and presses play.

“Oh,” Oikawa feels small, and doesn't like it. He's a tall man, nice shoulders, and can't remember feeling small. Even with Ushijima, who is even bigger, he still feels proud, and strong. The thought of Ushijima missing him (and doesn't missing always carry a hint of sadness, a hint of longing?), and being the cause of it, knocks him down at least six pegs. His knees ache a little so he unfolds them and shifts position to tuck his body into the corner of his large, comfy chair and let the stuffing swallow him at least half-whole.

“I guess,” Hinata says not much later, when Oikawa is already frowning to himself, “If I had to describe my life, it would be as a rubber ball. Lots of bouncing, lots of unintended refractions, but always ready to try again and keep going.”

He takes a long, slow sip of his diet coke, as if he's introspectively sipping at two fingers of whiskey in a soulful bar, but mostly ensconced in Oikawa's favourite blanket with reruns of Monty Python in the background. His eyes slide from the TV to Oikawa, expecting a response to his non-sequiter. Subtle. Real subtle.

“I guess mine would be like that sensation where you stub your toe,” Oikawa provides, thinking back on yesterday morning, in the dark, with a deeply unpleasant memory. “And you just try really, really hard to block out the fact it hurts. You're just sitting there completely still, wondering if the sharp edge of the table you just kicked by accident has feelings, and you're not sure yet if it hurts. Logically it hurts, but stubbed toes are not logical. You sit there, and you go ' _self, am I in pain?'_ and your damaged psyche screams ' _what are you saying, Tooru? We're fine! We're great!'_ and blissfully ignores your body waving its arms around desperately, firing off flares and dancing the hula trying to get you to check if you broke your pinkie toe.”

He catches his breath, if only slightly, and follows Hinata's lead in sipping slowly from his drink. He could go for that two-fingers of whiskey, but as a rule he never goes anywhere looking less than  _good_ , and right now he's on the wrong side of destitute.

“My great-aunt broke her big toe stepping into the bath tub,” he tells the awkward atmosphere. “She went to get in one day, didn't lift her leg high enough, and _bam!_ There she went. She decided it didn't hurt for about three years until she finally told her doctor, and by _then_ it had healed weird! They had to re-break it and she complained at all of us for about six weeks and reminds us of it every time bones, or feet, or shoes comes up in conversation.”

Hinata rolls his eyes and slips a hand from his blanket temple to swipe uselessly at the pizza box, barely grazing its cardboard corner and managing to only push it further away. He makes a desperate noise in loss, and stretches an extra half-inch.

“Maybe,” Hinata ventures, carefully avoiding eye contact with anything but the ceramic lucky cat near Oikawa's TV. “You should check on that pain and try to fix it before it heals funny and then it's too late. If it looks all gross and funky, you can still fix it. It just takes some effort.”

Resigned, defeated, and miserable, Hinata gets up for pizza and absconds to the other end of the couch with the entire thing. When Oikawa holds silent in his own fortress of fabric, Hinata initiates eye-contact. Eyes like some kind of weird owl-cat-grandmother or something that can't be carefully avoided if he doesn't want them to be.

“I hear you!” Oikawa throws his hands up slightly in surrender, almost unsettling his own take-out container of salad and a pizza slice precariously balanced on the edge of the tub. “I'll text him. Tomorrow.”

He grimaces at the Look. “Tonight.” He concedes, then grabs his phone with a grumble when the Look intensifies.

“And what do you propose I say, since you seem to know everything, oh wise and mighty Hinata?” he gripes, the sarcasm good-natured if slightly put out.

“Whatever it is you're feeling,” Hinata says, though Oikawa feels that tonight's eye-rolling has gotten out of hand, and he didn't deserve that last sigh. “Still fixable, remember? Your damaged psyche needs to hand over the keys to the rescue yacht for a minute while you follow your body's flares.”

The flares, unfortunately for him, are coming from six different directions at once.

_Hey!_ One flare says. _Didn't realize you were my boyfriend. Sorry 'bout that._

Another one chimes in with  _Well hey, you're normally so blunt, you couldn't just tell me we were dating?_

Then one more that has a pitifully small voice, on some barren rock-beach with no help in sight saying _I got it, I got we were together but it freaked me out because there's always been someone better than me if only by a little, and I was scared that when I wasn't something you were chasing after that my shine would wear off and you'd ditch me and then I'd have to learn to live with having dirty dishes in the sink again, and an unmade bed, and the occasional food-poisoning worry, so I dumped you before you could dump me to save my pride without thinking of the fall that I should have seen coming, so come back, please, the plant near the window is about to die and I think I'd cry if it did, which would be really not manly and get in the way of my finals_.

And as pitiful and small and pathetic that voice is, Oikawa bites his pride, bites his damaged psyche, and swallows his ego and types it out just like that, typos be damned, he really doesn't have the time to go back and fix them before he chickens out and decides he's not in pain for the next three years until he dates some other guys and either fucks that up because he's hung up on his college booty call or because he's like a broken pony trying to drag a plough. There's no time for perfection, and he guesses it's about time his less than pretty flaws come out.

Unmade beds and too many shower products are quaint flaws. Desperation and insecurity and fear are not.

“There. It's sent. Do you want to check, or good enough?” Oikawa swipes at his face with the back of his hand, and ignores that his eyes feel like they burn a bit.

“Nah,” Hinata says, and picks mushrooms off of one of Oikawa's slices of pizza. “Good job, though. Good job.”

-

His text, ultimately, is ignored. If he keeps looking at his phone he's probably going to break it from overuse, unlocking it in case he's missed a notification, opening up his texts, then closing them and tapping around the screen for an excuse as to why he opened it; checking a game here, twitter there, then closing it again to repeat in another five minutes without a much different result. He doesn't really get if he just fucked up too bad to repair out of some misguided kind of fear, or if Ushijima changed his number or something.

It takes him a full week of moping (and a cut index finger when he tries to re-make a stew Ushijima made and can't quite remember how he cut spring onions so quickly without even seeming to think about it) before he gives up and goes over.

The trip falls slightly short of where he needs it to go; outside the building his feet don't want to keep moving, probably spurred by more of whatever spurred him to act like an idiot in the first place. Knocking on the door suddenly seems like a terrifying prospect he can't quite bring himself to go through with.

Instead he sits down for a while on a bench in front of the building half-illuminated by a street light, his elbow resting on the back of the bench where he sits on it sideways, giving him just enough vision to see one of the windows right behind the bench; second floor, sober curtains, and hopefully, Ushijima. Maybe if he looks long enough, the words will come to him by instinct and pure luck like they have most of his life.

Maybe he used up his luck on his kindergarten show and tell, and the night he asked Ushijima on a whim if he wanted to come over and got a firm yes for his efforts.

One of the windows cracks open above him, so his heart skips a beat then sinks when it's not the right window but instead some bedding hangs from the windowsill to air, its owner giving him a look of mild suspicion and a modicum of curiosity before she disappears inside again.

Some ten, fifteen minutes later of the same set of about 6 thoughts running through his head, another window cracks open, and his heart just about stops.

Silence reigns for a minute.

“You're a coward,” Ushijima tells him. Light pools from the room behind him, framing him like a particularly skilled fresco. He can't tell if the words are reprimand or fact, but takes them as both. Above, still above, Ushijima crossed his arms in front of his chest and seems to shift back and forth, awkwardness plain in the set of his shoulders. He breathes in and glances at the ground around Oikawa. “I was wondering when you'd come and tell me in person.”

Oikawa shifts until he's on his knees on the bench, hands gipping on the backrest. Next to him his bag tips over and a power bar spills forgotten onto the floor, almost followed by a notepad to jot things down on.

Professing his failings like this is even scarier, the risk of someone walking up to see him about to plead shaking his core. What surprises him more, though, is that he's not unwilling. He breathes in deep and _thinks_ , the first time in a long time when he should have been doing it sooner.

“I'm a coward!” he calls up, and somewhere a light flickers on. “I'm an idiot, and a loser and I didn't know what was good for me. I freaked out when I saw I had a good thing going and instead of talking to you, I yelled at you and I ruined it.”

He bites his lip, the words not feeling quite enough.

“I was scared you'd get with me and then you'd _see_ me and-- I'm not all that much! I'm tall and a damn good sportsman, and pretty handsome but _handsome_ doesn't make a marriage as they always say and what else do I have to offer? I'm messy, and I love junk food, I'm petty and jealous and I hate your friends for knowing everything about you to the nothing I know, and it's no good! I can't make you put up with that so I ran instead of asking what you wanted, which makes me even more of a coward because I didn't want to hear you say _no_.”

The window with the light on cracks open. Someone yells a resounding “ _Shut up!”_

Somewhere in his speech, Ushijima's hands have appeared and they clutch the windowsill, his eyes fixed firmly somewhere just above Oikawa's.

“Come in,” he says, disappearing from the window, somehow likely to be waiting at his door, up close, and big, and unreadable.

When he reaches the building entrance it's still equally terrifying, but this time someone's expecting him. So he takes the stairs one at a time, counts them in lieu of thinking, and tries not to make an emergency exit through the window when he nears Ushijima.

“Coming in,” he tries to joke when he reaches the doorway, but doesn't crack a smile. This one does feel like a failure, so he takes a seat as directed and fiddles with the handle of his bag, his phone lighting up with a notification he has no desire to check.

Over in the kitchen, Ushijima busies himself with cups, and water, and a complete lack of desire for help.

“You don't think we make a good match?” Ushijima asks him out of the blue. His back is still turned, something from the fridge now on the counter in front of him receiving some sort of witchcraft. The question is asked bluntly with no regard for his feelings.

Oikawa looks at the table, then the bed, then the floor.

“You're a incredible chef where I'm not, and you're great in bed. You're neat, and you're tidy, you're smart and you have perseverance to rival Hercules. You're not judgemental, but you know what you want, and you speak your mind-”

“That's not what I asked,” Ushijima interrupts, finally turning with two cups of strong tea and a few light snacks on a plate. They seem like a good excuse for a moment of silence if needed. “I didn't ask for compliments. I asked if you think we're a good match.”

He finally sits across from Oikawa, his own tea cradled in his hands to warm them. Oikawa sets his on his knee and feels the warmth seeping in, but it doesn't quite reach his bones, so he stares in to it as if it has answers. Ushijima waits. Patient, he could add to his list.

“I don't know,” he finally admits. “I don't know how to tell. You fill in all my weak spots like being neat, like eating well, tolerating my jokes and not getting mad when I go a bit overboard. You listen to me go _on_ and _on_ and _on_ about God knows what in the universe, and you like all the movies I like. You don't _want_ anything from me.”

The words spill out until he drinks tea to drown them out and not babble like he always does. Then, he takes a biscuit offered on the plate slid towards him.

“You're right,” Ushijima tells him, his tea set firmly on the table. It all seems very final, and he prepares for heartbreak. “I don't want anything from you, and you've never required me to need something. You don't ask for me to change, but take me as I am.”

The conversation takes a u-turn, hope or sugar sweet on his tongue in his biscuit.

“You fill silence where I leave it,” Ushijima continues, hands folded in his lap. “You barrel ahead where I stop, have no qualms talking back to me, and don't get lost in over thinking if something is _necessary_ to say, but just say it.”

Ushijima seems to lighten slightly with a tiny smile, then looks down at his hands. “I suppose you complete me.”

He doesn't get long after he finishes his sentence before his words sink in and Oikawa spills a bit of tea in his haste to put it down, crumbs from his fingers dropping to the carpet before he's standing, clipping his shin on the edge of the table as he takes two long steps forward to lean forward and take a kiss that has the taste of tea sweeter than his. That's something to look out for; even Ushijima has a sweet tooth.

“I get another chance then?” Oikawa asks when he steps back, hands still on Ushijima's shoulders and their eyes locked together. “If you let me in, and you gave me tea, and you let me kiss you.

His words are stolen in a kiss in returns, some fingers running through his hair.

“Yes,” Ushijima tells him. “But from now on, you talk to me.”

_Deal_ , Oikawa thinks, and puts his mouth to better use while he thinks of everything he should have said.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you all for your support in writing this! I hope you enjoyed it. <3


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